Google’s results no longer in denial over “Did the Holocaust happen?”
Google’s been under intense pressure to alter its results after it was found a week ago to be listing a Holocaust-denial site first for a search on “Did the Holocaust happen.” Now, that’s finally changing.
It’s not clear whether this is due to a change with Google in terms of its ranking algorithms or by the efforts of external parties to influence the results. My bet is on the latter. Google has previously said that it wanted to address this and similarly egregious results but that the process would take time.
On iPad, denial site bumped from first place
When searching on my iPad this evening around 1am ET, I found that a page from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum had moved to the top free listing, knocking a denial discussion forum page that had been there into second place.
I was not logged into Google and using incognito mode within Chrome, so my personal search history shouldn’t have been influencing this result. I also saw these results on desktop, when I simulated using an iPad.
On desktop, denial site remains tops but likely to change
Initially on desktop, the older results were showing still showing for me, as was the case with mobile results on my iPhone:
But by 2:45am ET, even my desktop results had changed to move the USHMM page first (my iPhone ones had not):
I suspect we’ll see what’s happening for me begin to spread to all devices and for more people. It can often take time for ranking changes to move across the whole of Google, because of the many data centers it is using. But I’m not alone in seeing them:
New sites seek to alter results
Also as part of the change, a new site called Did The Holocaust Happen that was specifically designed to get into the rankings and take on the denial sites is showing up, appearing in position seven:
Another site I learned about tonight hasn’t yet seemed to have gained ground into the listings.
Why the change?
As I said, I doubt this is a deliberate change by Google. In particular, the denial site remains in the listings, which is a sign it hasn’t been penalized. That would have been problematic for Google, because it really doesn’t have a good policy to pull sites for this type of reason.
And if that sounds crazy, I strongly encourage you to read my story from last week on this topic. Google pulling sites for not being able to prove things could lead to it having to do stuff like banning religious sites. It needs a comprehensive, defendable policy. It also needs time to develop an algorithm that can better cope with the amount of “post-truth” content that’s been developing.
So if Google didn’t make the change, what’s happening? The work of external parties, almost certainly.
For one, as people have reported on this story, starting with the Guardian that first wrote about it and followed by others, those news stories have gained ground. That’s natural for both Google and Bing. Fresh content, especially from news sites, is often rewarded on a short term basis.
The writer for the Guardian who has been tracking this issue also did a follow-up story about buying an ad against these results, to jump above the denial site through paid listings. However, she’s not the only one. The aforementioned US Holocaust Memorial Museum has also either been buying ads or someone buying them for the museum, as you can see in my first example above.
That ad is almost certainly NOT causing its free listing to rank better. Google strongly denies that ads influence rankings this way, nor has there ever been any serious evidence that it has an impact.
However, having the ad there could be causing more people to realize that the museum should be listed first and begin linking to it. A rise or links, especially from authority sites and with the right type of textual context, could have an impact. The right links, the right way, can effectively act like votes to improve ranking.
As for that new site that’s appearing, it’s was built by an SEO — someone who knows search engine optimization — specifically to do well for this search. It’s like hiring a PR firm to deal with bad publicity. PR people know how to push for good press. SEOs know how to push for good search results.
That SEO was John Doherty, who’s well followed by other SEOs on Twitter, who likely found ways to push links and promote the site for the good cause. Remember that the next time you hear that SEOs are all scum-sucking evil doers.
Doherty and SEOs in general have no secret powers. They can’t guarantee a favorable change in rankings, any more than a PR person can promise a good story in the press. But they have great knowledge that can improve the odds, and that’s what I think is happening here.
The challenge of the infrequent search
It’s also easier to happen because frankly, this isn’t a popular search. Very few people do it. The Guardian reporter who started running those ads, tapping into Google’s own data, found it happened about 10,000 times per month — or about 300 times per day. Google handles 5.5 billion searches per day. In short, this search practically never happens.
Since it doesn’t happen that often, it’s easier to impact the results. In fact, one of the reasons the denial site has probably ranked well and for so long is because practically no one who would be concerned about this happening has done the search to even notice — nor notice to the degree of creating content to combat it.
Why does Bing get it right & Google get it wrong?
Of course, it is weird, disappointing and disheartening that on this search, Google wasn’t getting one of the good, authoritative anti-denial sites that were listed second and third into the top position. That’s especially so oft-maligned when Bing managed to do it and still does, showing Wikipedia’s “Holocaust denial” page first among the non-news web listings:
As my story last week explained, there’s some speculation that Google’s results are different because it’s rewarding clickthrough behavior more heavily. IE, if people who do this search click a lot on a particular site, that could move it higher IF Google operated that way.
If more people who do this search are already in a Holocaust denial frame of mind, then they might favor a denial site and that might move it higher.
The problem with this theory is that Google has been steadfast in saying that clickthrough does not directly impact its rankings like this. But, it could be that some of the clickthrough behavior is being indirectly mined by Google’s machine learning RankBrain system in a way that is causing these results and others to move some sites higher than its old system that more heavily weighted links.
That can cause some people to wonder why Google might not shutdown RankBrain or shift back to links. But links have their own problems and can be gamed, to the degree that some exploits even became known as Google bombs.
In addition, RankBrain probably helps improve many results that are far more popular than this. Google’s challenge is to fix its system so that whatever is working well for more popular searches isn’t causing results that give the impression that it’s somehow biased toward heavily conservative right-wing sites for infrequent ones.
About that supposed right-wing bias
That’s what another Guardian article wrote — that Google was promoting information with “an extreme rightwing bias.” The only bias really was in that article itself, which didn’t do searches to see if Google was perhaps also showing an extreme leftwing bias. And you could make that argument with things like this “white people are stupid” search:
Does that give you the impression that the alt-right is somehow in control of Google? Nor did that article bother to note that if you want to cherry-pick infrequent searches, it’s not hard to find Bing suggesting objectionable searches and then delivering actual objectionable results in response. For example, “was the holocaust a hoax” on Bing lists in the first position a page that says it was:
I point this stuff out not to excuse Google. It’s the leading search engine, proudly touts the high relevancy of its results and fails in that goal when listing a Holocaust denial site first for the “Did the Holocaust happen” search.
But it’s not just a challenge for Google. It’s not just something that has a rightwing bias. It’s an overall search challenge, one that really few have noticed until our attention has been focused on it it as people grapple with the growing world of “fake news” and a “post-truth world.”
Coming up with an overall fix for this is something I expect will take weeks, and when it arrives, will likely be in the form of how Google tackled the challenge of “content farms.” There, it took on weeding out low-quality content from its results through what became known as the Panda Update, a filter designed to keep the low-quality stuff out.
Having met with people at Google last week, as I wrote, they definitely want to make changes. It’s as top-of-mind as anything I’ve ever seen Google concerned about. But they want to make it in a deliberate and comprehensive fashion.
In the meantime, the results — like any search results — will change on their own based on external factors. Now that awareness has been raised here, that seems to be sparking change.
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